The three-pound pewter serving trencher slipped from Jon Hale’s fingers and rang flat against the oil-slick flagstones as he dropped to both knees beside Sir Cael Ardent.
Two paces away, pinned chest-down against the stones beneath Alden Bram’s heavy knee and Master Baker Dunstan Harl’s iron wagon-shackles, Warden Tomas Brecht let out a ragged, wheezing grunt through his broken left forearm—yet his pale, unblinking eyes were twisted sideways across the spilled lamp-oil, fixed with triumphant hunger on the back of the young knight’s bare right hand.
“Elin, bring the lantern down—closer!” Jon barked, seizing Cael’s right wrist in both of his scarred hands and tilting the back of the knight’s hand into the yellow beam of the hooded tallow light. “Bram, keep your knee on Brecht’s spine! Don’t let him move a finger toward that dropped needle!”
“He isn’t moving an inch, Jon,” Alden Bram growled from the shadows, leaning all two hundred pounds of his mason’s frame onto the ash measuring rod across Brecht’s shoulder blades while Dunstan Harl twisted the iron shackle-chain tight enough to bite into the bureaucrat’s black broadcloth cuffs. “Marris, kick that black spike under the hearth-stone where nobody’s boot can touch it!”
Master Mason Marris Gault used the flat blade of her stone-chisel to flick the six-inch grooved black needle carefully into the cold ash-trough beneath the fender, then turned back toward the circle of light with her hand over her mouth. Beside the barred street door, grain-weigher Tomas Miller and the three river-barge…
